Triptych, May–June 1973
The oil-on-canvas was painted in memory of Bacon's lover George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of the artist's retrospective at Paris's Grand Palais on 24 October 1971.
[1] Bacon was haunted and preoccupied by Dyer's loss for the remaining years of his life[2] and painted many works based on both the actual suicide and the events of its aftermath.
[4] In 2006, The Daily Telegraph's art critic Sarah Crompton wrote that "emotion seeps into each panel of this giant canvas ... the sheer power and control of Bacon's brushwork take the breath away".
Peter Lacy, his first lover, would often tear up the young artist's paintings, beat him up in drunken rages, and leave him on the street half-conscious.
His compact and athletic build belied a docile and inwardly tortured personality; the art critic Michael Peppiatt described him as having the air of a man who could "land a decisive punch".
The paintings gave him stature, a raison d'être, and offered meaning to what Bacon described as Dyer's "brief interlude between life and death".
Yet as Dyer's novelty diminished within Bacon's circle of sophisticated intellectuals, the younger man became increasingly bitter and ill at ease.
Withdrawn and reserved when sober, Dyer was insuppressible when drunk, and would often attempt to "pull a Bacon" by buying large rounds and paying for expensive dinners for his wide circle.
[19] In each panel, Dyer is framed by a doorway, and set against a flat, anonymous foreground coloured with black and brown hues.
[20] Although his arched back, thighs and legs are according to the Irish critic Colm Tóibín, "lovingly painted", Dyer is by now clearly a broken man.
The central panel shows Dyer sitting on the toilet bowl in a more contemplative pose, his head and upper body writhing beneath a hanging lightbulb which throws a large bat-like shadow formed in the shape of a demon or Eumenide.
The art critic Sally Yard has noted that in the portrayal of Dyer's flesh, "life seems to visibly drain ... into the substantial character of the shadow beneath him".
[1] Schmied has proposed that in this frame the blackness of the background has enveloped the subject, and it "seems to be advancing forward over the threshold, threatening the viewer like a flood or a giant bat with flapping wings and extended claws.
The triptych's composition and setting are poised to suggest instability, and the doors in each side panel are splayed outwards as if to look into the darkness of the foreground.
[27] Davies believes the work is a narrative, panoramic view of Dyer's suicide, and that the triptych's format implies a temporal continuity between each frame.
Ernst van Alphen has argued that, notwithstanding spatial inconsistencies—the light bulb featured in the central panel is missing from the two outer canvasses, while the doorway view is reversed in the center panel—the triptych is a "plain representation of a story".
A number of characteristics bind the triptychs together: the form of a monochromatically rendered doorway features centrally in all, and each is framed by flat and shallow walls.
[29] In each three Dyer is stalked by a broad shadow; which takes the form of pools of blood or flesh in the outer panels and the wings of the angel of death in the left hand and central images.
[32] Describing the Black Triptychs in 1993, the art critic Juan Vicente Aliaga wrote that "the horror, the abjection that oozed from the crucifixes has been transformed in his last paintings into quiet solitude.
The masculine bodies entwined in a carnal embrace have given way to the solitary figure leaning over the washbasin, standing firm on the smooth ground, neutral, bald-headed, his convex back deformed, his testicles contracted in a fold.
"[33] When asked by the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg in 1984 if the portraits painted in the wake of Dyer's death were depictions of his emotional reaction to the event, Bacon replied that he did not consider himself to be an "expressionist painter".
"[34] Throughout his career, Bacon consciously and carefully avoided explaining the meaning behind his paintings, and pointedly observed that they were not intended as narratives, nor open to interpretation.
[35] A borderline alcoholic himself, Bacon continued to explain that his dead friends were "generally heavy drinkers", and that their deaths led directly to his composition of a series of meditative self-portraits which emphasised his own aging and awareness of the passage of time.
